I wish he'd survived the Bush administration. This novel will never cease to be important, and one day, as a cultural artifact of a forgotten culture from a forgotten nation, it will be one of the most important anthropological pieces in existence. This is a place where no questions get asked because no answers would make sense, and the only thing profound about any of it is that you know, on a gut level, that all the oil used to produce all the plastic used to build that city no doubt funded an island shaped like Australia that was built off the coast of the UAE over the weekend.
This is a place where a lawyer could leave you with a hotel bill.
Thompson could easily mingle with a law enforcement convention and not get noticed. It's just about a buck, and every other blink reminds you of it. Yet you never, ever feel like it is evil or subversive or curious in any way. It would make you want to blow your brains out if it weren't so goddamned fun, even if you're gay, you hate gambling and hookers make your brain itch. It's sensory overload on a scale drugs can't equal, a place where you almost have to take a brimful of Valium and a pint of ether to feel normal and not feel utterly ashamed at the state of the human condition. It's the living, pulsing, filthing embodiment of the Holy Dollar. It's where families go on vacations with ten-year-olds, children who get handed fliers for prostitutes. It's where Sin goes to die when it's embarrassed for itself. It's a nightmare, a joke, a blunder of comical, cosmically-fucked proportions. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas IS Las Vegas. Suddenly, all the subtle differences between this and his other work made sense, and I realized that he had captured the true tackiness of the truest tacky city on the entire planet (though Dubai with their fucking Island fantasies are likely to take over soon). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to me, wasn't his best work. For years, no work of his stood out to me as much as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or the Gonzo letters. Like Mark Twain, he chronicled American stupidity in the tongue of his generation, and he captured it perfectly, from the insanity of the drug experience to the depravity of American politics. But he chose to do what he did, and he did it better than any of his generation. He probably could have been a brilliant novelist of any kind. He probably could have been a very rich super-novelist of popular, uninspired filth. He spoke to a true astonishment at the complete, unrelenting fuckedupedness of America and her politics, and he did it with a bite that was deserved and unmatched. Thompson is dearly missed by many people, and on a personal level, I miss him deeply. I hadn't read this book in years, and previously, it hadn't even been my favorite Hunter S. I recently went to Las Vegas for the first, and probably only, time in my life.
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